As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems are increasingly using persistent memory technologies such as Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Modules (NVDIMMs), including NVDIMM-N. An NVDIMM is a memory module that may retain data even when electrical power is removed either from an unexpected power loss, system crash or from a normal system shutdown. To enable such functionality, an NVDIMM may include a traditional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) which may store data during normal operation when electrical power is available from a power supply unit and a flash memory to back up data present in the DRAM when a loss of electrical power from the power supply unit occurs. A battery, capacitor, or other energy storage device either internal or external to the NVDIMM may supply electrical energy for a “save” operation to transfer data from the DRAM to the flash memory in response to a power loss event from the power supply unit.
In typical DRAM-only implementations of memory systems, no DRAM health is made visible to a host system, as DRAMs are assumed to have almost infinite endurance. However, on NVDIMM-N modules, where the non-volatile media (e.g., flash) operates in the background for guaranteeing persistence on a power loss and is unexposed to the host system, there is a single health bit that is used to warn the user on the media health on the whole. This bit informs the host memory controller (e.g., executing within a processor) that the media accessed has exceeded a given user-configurable percentage of the maximum accesses allowed (e.g., 70 percent). Such health bit represents the entire media of an DIMM (or NVDIMM) module as it assumes the entire volatile media (e.g., DRAM) storage space is mapped to non-volatile media (e.g., flash memory) in a save operation during a power loss. However, in actuality, there may exist specific portions of the non-volatile media (e.g., blocks or ranks) that can have different failure rates due to any number of factors, including shrinking process geometries, process variations, etc. Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide fine-grained media health visibility to a host system.